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 Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 12:48 am
Babylon followed Mistral, letting her lead the way and determine where they went. This was, after all, her wonder, and he didn’t want to rob her of the privilege to explore it. And while he was more experienced as a knight than she was, his experiences were of Babylon. He knew nothing of Mistral’s history or mysteries, and this room was as much a puzzle to him as it was to her.
He leaned against the desk, gesturing for the page to take the chair - they’d been walking a long time, and it would be good to take a break. He felt one of the drawers shift under his leg.
“Huh,” said Babylon, turning and pulling the drawer open. In it lay a single book, covered in a very fine layer of dust. He picked it off, blew on it to clean it, and handed it over to Mistral. “What do you make of this?” he asked.
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Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 12:48 am
It sure was… a book! Mistral gave him a look like he was stupid, but she also settled on the desk chair and considered the small stretch of hall she could see from the seat. “Maybe this was some kind of security checkpoint, but there’s nothing like a visitor’s pass in here.” She flipped open the book, and stared at… some kind of grid? Not a child’s character guide, as much as the initial inspection reminded her of her early education in Mandarin Chinese, of which she remembered little but how to invite people to dinner. “Maybe it’s a calendar,” she said. “Useless for what we need.” Except it did provide some character examples, things that they could cross-compare later? Maybe.
Either way, she didn’t think she was getting much further today. “I guess we could use it as a base of operations,” she said, “I noticed that I arrived in the same place I left. So I’d just have to return here before going home every time?”
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Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 12:48 am
Babylon couldn’t make any more sense of the book than Mistral could - maybe even less - but her guess that it was a calendar seemed good to him. “Those are - I think those might be numbers,” he said, pointing to some of the writing. “So maybe you’re right.” He couldn’t fathom why you’d need an apartment this close to the entrance - maybe a guard house? But whoever’s room it had been, they didn’t have any use for it now.
“This would make a good staging room,” he agreed. “I can take measurements on the bed next time we’re here, and we can bring in a mattress and some supplies so you can stay here for longer trips when you feel up to it.” Eyeballing the frame right now, though, it didn’t look like a standard size - maybe he could rig something together by cutting up sheets of foam.
“That’s how it works as far as I can tell,” he said, which sort of begged the question if he was going to wind up in Mistral next time he tried to go to Babylon. “If you left from here every time, you’d start from here every time. What do you want to do?”
Wow, he thought, I completely forgot I just came from my father’s funeral until just now. She’d done a good job of distracting him.
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Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 12:49 am
She leaned over the book and nodded. “Those do look pretty familiar.” Arabic numbers had maybe been invented by the time of… whenever this guard station had been abandoned. She closed the book, slowly, and then tucked it into her arm. “We should go home now,” she said, “I don’t think we can straight-up disappear for as long as I’d like to, and I still haven’t figured out how to keep my pills with me when I’m like this. I’m not even sure I can, you know?” She smiled at Babylon, all dimples. “Thanks, Derouen.”
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Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 12:49 am
“Yeah,” Babylon agreed uncertainly, taking hold of her arm. “People are going to start wondering where I am.” Not that he particularly wanted to go back to Earth, but - he had a responsibility there to uphold, and leaving his mother and sister to fend off his grandparents on their own was just cruel.
“No problem,” he said, returning her smile. “Always a pleasure.”
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